BAD TIME TO BE IN IT

by David Burnsworth

  And this way, she could stop at Starbucks for her venti-triple-skinny vanilla frappuccino.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Wednesday afternoon

  While Tess dug into the history of Crome’s credit card that paid for the room Maureen had been in when the picture was taken to see if there were any more expenses, Blu chased down another lead. This one wasn’t so difficult and one that he should have thought of sooner. He placed a call, got voicemail, and left a message.

  Andeline returned his call as he backed into a spot on King Street.

  He answered with, “How’s it going, And?”

  “I’m fine. How’s Crome?”

  “What have you heard?” he asked, cutting to the chase.

  “Someone sent him a picture of his woman with a gun to her head. Crome scared the crap out of Phineous and then bribed him with two really low-rent girls, if you ask me. And you’re calling me. I’d say it’s pretty serious.”

  “It is serious. Okay, so that’s what you’ve heard. What do you know?”

  She said, “Why don’t you get out of your truck and come in so I can see that beautiful face of yours?”

  Andeline was older than Blu by more than a decade and she enjoyed toying with him. She wasn’t his type and never would be. But she was a fantastic source when he needed some obscure piece of information. Her contacts ran the gamut of the Charleston elite and underworld. Especially where those two worlds met up, which happened more than one would think. Money had a habit of causing the downfall of many a good man.

  He did as she asked, got out of his truck, ignoring the meter since it was after six p.m. and walked into her restaurant. The former Madame in all senses of the title gave him a big grin when he walked in. Instead of their normal cursory banter and lack of physical touch, she stepped around her hostess podium, came over, gave him a tight hug, and a lingering peck on the cheek.

  It occurred to Blu that Andeline might also be aware of his troubles with Billie.

  They ended the embrace. Her bright blue eyes took him in and her dark hair with highlights that defied her age formed somewhat of a halo. She’d long ago stopped caring about what others thought of her weight, which Blu guessed measured over where the doctors said it should be. But she wore it well along with her designer dresses like the gray and white hugging number she had on at the moment.

  She said, “I really wish you’d come around more than just when you need something.”

  “Me too, And, I mean it.”

  “Sure you do.”

  He looked down.

  She said, “You eat dinner yet?”

  The truth was he was starving and was planning on wolfing down three or four PB&J sandwiches at home later. “No.”

  Grabbing a menu, she said, “It appears I’ve got you right where I want you.”

  He wasn’t sure what to say.

  “Follow me.” She led him to a vacant corner booth.

  He sat and she said, “After I get someone to cover for me at the front, you and I are going to have a nice meal.”

  “Really, And, you don’t have to go through all this trouble.”

  She leaned in close to him and held his chin in her hand. “I’m trying real hard to be a lady around you, Mr. Carraway.”

  With that, she stood upright and walked away, leaving Blu to contemplate how he’d gotten here. But he knew the answer. He was here to find information about Maureen’s kidnapper. Andeline hadn’t been this forward before. Something wasn’t right. With a sudden urge to leave, he turned in his chair to get up but was stopped by Andeline now standing beside him.

  “Going somewhere?” She placed a pint glass in front of him. Knowing, as all his friends did, that he didn’t drink alcohol, she’d given him a dark soft drink. Bubbles in the glass floated to the top and quietly snapped and popped.

  He raised his hands. “The restroom to wash up.”

  Giving him a knowing smile like she had caught him in a ruse, she waved her hand in the direction of the lavatories.

  As he made his way to the restroom, he thought about the situation. Either this was a joke or she was serious. And there could only be one… no, two reasons why she’d be serious. The one he thought about immediately was she wanted to change their relationship from friendly to something else. The other was that she needed to talk to him about something important and was having a bit of fun at his expense. For the sake of sanity, he forced himself to think it was the latter. After he relieved himself and washed his hands, he walked out of the restroom with a better understanding of Andeline.

  The first course of four—she-crab soup—along with Andeline awaited his return to the table. He seated himself, unfolded the napkin, picked up his spoon, and sampled the not-quite-bisque. It was perfect.

  Andeline smiled at him.

  He said, “This is one great restaurant you have here, And.”

  “I know.” She spooned some soup.

  “So what is it you want to tell me?”

  “All business and no play makes Blu a dull boy.”

  Scraping the last bit of liquid off the bottom of the bowl, he said, “You know me too well.”

  “Yes, I do,” she said. “And you are really rattled right now. Not because of me, not really. I’m sorry, I so enjoy taking advantage of your uncertainty.”

  “It’s Crome,” he said.

  “I know.”

  He put down his spoon. “What else do you know?”

  A waiter poured more wine into her glass and removed the empty soup bowls. She waited until he walked away. “I know about Maureen and that you two have been hunting her all over town. I know that your partner tried to go out on his own and you wouldn’t let him. I know that no less than Patricia Voyels, Tess Ray and Harmony Childs, and Brack and Darcy Pelton are looking into it.”

  Their salads came.

  After the waiter set the plates down, ground fresh black pepper over them, and left, Blu said, “What else?”

  “None of my sources knows who is doing this.”

  Blu forked some ruffage. “That doesn’t help me out here.”

  “It should,” she said. “Think about it. If I don’t know, it’s not out there. You’ve gotten as far as I have, which is saying something, if you don’t mind me saying.”

  “I don’t, but I’m not happy about it.”

  “Happiness is a state of mind, my friend,” she said. “I’m always happy because I choose to be.”

  He thought about countering her statement with something like, “Until someone sticks a gun to your head.” But, as an ex-Madam who’d worked her way up from the bottom, Andeline had seen and experienced as much in her life has he had in his. Maybe more. That meant gunplay and death. This was nothing new to her. It was just another day.

  The information he’d learned did not help him out, but he found himself beginning to relax.

  And then she asked, “So how’s Billie?”

  Chapter Twenty

  Wednesday, early evening

  Harmony Childs knew she was playing a long shot. She’d come across something and decided to ditch tailing Crome and her normal nightly video post and go hunting for the jerk-wad who thought kidnapping a woman was okay.

  Lucky for her, Tess had volunteered for “following Crome” duty tonight.

  Harmony was still upset with Crome but this was about Maureen. No woman deserved to be going through what she was. This guy, if Harmony found him first, would experience hell on earth.

  These were not normal thoughts for her, and she felt herself feeding on the anger stemming from her own morbidity.

  Piloting her Jeep with the new tires Blu had bought after Crome shot out the back ones in order to save her, she cut off a tourist in a crossover SUV and merged onto Seventeen North toward Mount Pleasant. The transmission downshifted when she gave it the spurs and the t
wo-ton off-road machine barreled up the incline and over the Cooper River.

  The information that had caused her to take this detour from her normal life came in the form of an unsolicited call from one of her budding sources. The guy—they were mostly men—mentioned that he’d seen a man manhandle a woman out of the back of a van and into a pickup truck and speed away. This was not something that happened every day, she hoped. He’d described the woman as being attractive, tan, and Caucasian with tattoos on her arms and approximately forty years old. He’d described Maureen.

  So Harmony had decided to take the bait.

  Blu had told her not to go alone. Tess was busy following Crome who needed a padded room. There was no way in hell she was calling her old boss Patricia Voyels or her old nemesis Darcy Pelton. If somehow she could take Darcy’s husband away from her, Harmony promised she’d be a good girl for the rest of her days. If Blu Carraway was a prettier Dos Equis commercial, Brack Pelton was Don Draper gift-wrapped in a suntanned beach bar owner.

  Thinking about the men, and getting more than a tad worked up in the process, made her almost miss the turn.

  Oh, yeah. There was a reason she was on this quest alone. She felt safe with her recently-purchased Ruger, Concealed Weapons Permit, and one-on-one tactical training by her recently-dumped S.W.A.T. boyfriend. The man had taught her a lot, but had no idea his time was limited to how much she felt she could learn from him. Most men in her life had been like that.

  Unlike with that drug dealer who got the drop on her last year, she felt ready. No one would get the chance to shoot her again. If she’d learned anything from observing Blu and Brack and Crome, it was to shoot first and ask questions later. If someone drew down, she’d blow them away.

  Another thing she’d learned from the men was to control the meeting location. Blu was particularly good at this and she’d observed him sidestep potential threats by stacking the deck in his favor.

  She pulled in to the sand drive of the Pirate’s Cove and parked.

  Like Blu and Crome, Brack was an action junkie. She didn’t exactly inform him of her intention to use his bar as a safe zone. God knew the place was anything but, given that it had already been shot up once in the past couple years. But the man knew how to defend himself and she’d personally seen the two pistols and shotgun kept close at hand behind the bar.

  What she hadn’t planned on, and now mentally kicked herself for, was her attire. This was a tourist town and she wore business casual. To everyone else around, she looked like someone who worked in an office celebrating happy-hour. It just so happened that the surroundings were a lowcountry island facing the Atlantic Ocean. Such was life in paradise.

  She made her way up the front steps, opened the door, and cut through full tables of what she would guess were people from everywhere other than Charleston County eating plates of peel-and-eat shrimp and slurping margaritas. The place was booming, not just because of Brack’s business manager’s savvy management skills, but also because of his reputation of return fire.

  The Isle of Palms Police Department had doubled in size thanks to him. With a positive spin on all the violence, the Town Council had reluctantly embraced the pirate image of the bar and used it to their advantage. It cost the council some overhead in the form of extra personnel, but the influx of tourists wanting to take selfies with the bullet holes purposely left in the walls more than made up for the additional expense.

  Staffed almost entirely by single mothers, thanks to its sympathetic manager, the bar, like its owner, had a reputation. Except instead of one that skirted the law and could be prone to violence like Brack, the Pirate’s Cove was known for the attractive wait staff and bartenders. The woman serving drinks behind the bar when Harmony walked up was an old acquaintance.

  “How’s it going, Harmony?” she said. “What’ll you have?”

  Dropping her purse on the left of two empty stools, Harmony pulled out the other and sat. “Hey, Valerie. I’ll take a Corona and a menu.”

  Valerie got a bottle from the cooler, popped the top, and set it on a coaster in front of Harmony along with a slice of lime and the menu. She said she’d be back in a minute and went to serve other customers.

  Harmony’s use of the menu was mostly for cover. She had eaten in the place enough times that two of her suggestions had been added to it.

  She ordered a grilled chicken sandwich with avocado called “the Harmony” and chips and salsa when Valerie returned.

  While she waited for her food and her source, Harmony checked her phone and found two missed calls and a text. Her source was running late.

  She was used to it. Half the time they never even showed up, so getting a courtesy message was a good sign that the meet would actually take place. As she set the phone on the bar next to her beer, she felt something poke her leg and looked down. It was Brack’s dog, Shelby.

  The beast wielded control over most women he came in contact with. Harmony knew she was no exception and didn’t fight the urge to hop off her stool and squat to give him a proper greeting.

  The dog licked her face and let her scratch him behind the ears. She might have entertained the thought about taking Brack home for a night, but she wanted Shelby forever.

  A man’s voice said, “Hey, Harmony.”

  Harmony looked up at Brack and said, “Hey, yourself.”

  “Business or pleasure?” he asked.

  “That depends,” she said. “What did you have in mind?”

  If nothing else, the man was fun to toy with. Especially when she caught his suntanned face darken a shade.

  “Very funny,” he said. “I’ll take that to mean you’re working right now. Need me to stick around?”

  “In more ways than one,” she said.

  He waited for her real answer.

  She said, “I’ve got a source who says he might have seen Maureen. I hope you don’t mind the information exchange taking place here.”

  He said, “Not at all.”

  Backup sufficiently secured, Harmony got to her seat, squeezed the lime in her beer, and took a long pull. Eventually, she wanted to be in a bigger city covering bigger things. But when this situation was resolved, it would be the story in the lowcountry. At least, she planned on making it so, but only after Maureen was returned home safely and the kidnapper sufficiently dead.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Wednesday, early evening

  The man watched Harmony sitting at the bar flirting with the owner and his dog. He sure seemed interested in her.

  Women were just users and teases. Harmony was youthful but nowhere near innocent. He knew because he’d been following her for the past few nights—ever since that blowup in McDonalds where she told Crome off. He felt she was someone he should get to know. So he put a tracker on her car and watched her when time allowed.

  The woman had three different guys she was seeing. Or sleeping with. She was no different than any other woman he’d come across lately. Except for Maureen, who as far as the man could tell, stayed truer to Crome than he did to her. He knew the time was right after the night Crome stayed out with Ms. Harmony sitting over there and her cohort, Tess. They’d drank together first at a bar downtown, and then back at Harmony’s apartment two blocks away. Meanwhile, Maureen’s car, he knew because he’d also had a tracker on it, had been at home the whole time waiting on Crome to return. The biker was such an ass.

  The man would show her he was better for her than Crome. That would put her biker boyfriend over the edge. He’d already showed her he was more faithful than Crome simply by returning every night to rub lotion on her back. Sooner or later, she’d let him do it without shackles and medication, but these things took time.

  Harmony had already wreaked enough havoc with Maureen’s and Crome’s relationship. Maureen might just appreciate the gesture if something bad were to happen to the young woman.

 
As he finished the thought, the mutt Harmony played with on the floor jumped up, looked in his direction, and bared his teeth as if reading his mind.

  Smart dog.

  While he loved most animals, he hated dogs. Here was another reason why.

  Harmony nursed a second beer, hope of the source showing up dwindling with every sip. Every time her phone chirped, she’d look at the display. Normally she liked it when her men messaged her. But now they were just false positives. She didn’t want to hear from them. She wanted to hear from the source who seemed to be playing a pathetic game.

  The conversation with Brack, while deliciously playful, had turned business when he asked if she wanted him to shoot to kill. From just about anyone else, that line would be nothing but a bad joke, or at least one in poor taste. From Brack, it was serious. He took things to the edge and then jumped off.

  Her instruction had been to incapacitate but not fatally wound. They still hadn’t found Maureen. A dead source or kidnapper told no tales.

  The next phone chirp was Tess. Thinner by ounces, Tess had the true light blonde hair men sometimes killed for, and that glasses-wearing librarian thing going for her. The problem as Harmony saw it was that Tess was too damn smart for her own good. She had no heart, at least not one that got in the way of advancing her career. While Harmony always had at least two, or sometimes three like at present, men to toy with, Tess struggled to hold onto one. They’d be attracted to her physical beauty but most couldn’t hold an intelligent conversation to keep her attention.

  Harmony’s strength, as she saw it, was reading people, seeing what they had to offer, and getting what she could from them. Tess didn’t have the patience.

  The mistake Harmony knew she’d made last year, when she got in her Jeep with Tim the drug dealer and thinking it was a good idea, was pride. Crome, whom she’d been toying with, had broken protocol and asked Brack to find out from Darcy some information. Nothing wrong except that sooner or later, Harmony would have found it. But the man had gone around her. And no one went around Harmony, as far as she was concerned.